Initial Impasses in Aristotle's Metaphysics

In order to orient the inquiry of the Metaphysics, Aristotle begins with the traditional opinions about the causes of things as a whole, and draws out their inherent difficulties. This, in part, follows from his general dialectical method: he does not begin with first principles and deduce from them a universal philosophy, but begins with the traditional beliefs that he has inherited. In one sense, this method takes into account the "thrownness" of the philosopher; that is, the fact that the philosopher is always historically situated and does not have immediate access to objective truths from which he can begin his philosophy. To start in any other way covertly imports one's inescapable intellectual inheritance into the inquiry, and allows this inheritance to be acknowledged and addressed up front. This gives Aristotle's dialectic an advantage over any deductive metaphysics, in that his starting points need not be incontrovertible.

Aristotle examines the philosophy of those that went before him by drawing out their inherent tensions and contradictions. From these tensions, he establishes the problematic from which the Metaphysics will work. Aristotle must get some idea of what sort of thing metaphysics reveals; that is, of the nature of the metaphysical question. The immediate difficulty lies in the fact that one cannot know what metaphysics asks about without knowing the object of the metaphysical question. One must know the end before the beginning.

As an initial matter, the metaphysical question concerns the source of things. But is this source one or many? If there are irreducibly many sources of things (e.g., the four elements, or the four causes), then there is no metaphysical knowledge, but different kinds of knowledge for each kind of source. The sources can be irreducibly many either in kind or in number. If the sources are irreducibly many in kind, then thinghood is impossible, for thinghood implies a kind of unity which is grasped in thought when one grasps its cause. However, if the causes of the thing are multiple in kind, then no unity exists by which one might grasp the thing. Yet things present themselves to us in a kind of unity which we immediately and pre-reflectively grasp without trouble. Positing a multiplicity of sources different in kind is simply insufficient to explain everyday experience.

On the other hand, if the source of things are irreducibly many and differ in number, but not in kind (Aristotle calls these elements), then there will be nothing other than the elements. The sources would differ by virtue of their particularity alone (being this atom and not that one, for example), and if there were no causes higher than these elements, nothing could exist other than these elements. Syllabic sounds, for example, in order to come together and form words, have to take on the reality of a whole above and beyond the parts. This whole necessarily takes the form of an unified cause incompatible with an ontology that posits irreducibly many sources.

A multiplicity of causes precludes the unity that things possess, and fails as an explanation of ordinary experience. If, however, the cause of things is one (this would be called "oneness" or "being", and applies univocally to all things, the Parmenidean problem arises. To understand being in this way would be to understand being as a universal genus or category. "But", Aristotle says, "it is not possible for either oneness or being to be a single genus of things," for then there would be only one Being. Being, understood as a universal category, would rule out individual beings as illusions, because a species is differentiated within a genus by differentia outside the genus. "[I]t is not possible either to predicate the species within a genus of their own differentia, or to predicate the genus without its species of the differentia."

In the footnote to his translation, Joe Sachs explains it this way:

If we define doves as wild pigeons, the species is doves, the genus pigeons, and the differentia is being wild. If this is a sound definition, it cannot be true that (all) wild things are doves, or, the more important point here, that (all) wild things are pigeons. The reason is that all characteristics by which a genus is differentiated into the species are outside the genus.

The characteristics that differentiate genus into species must be outside the genus, for if the differentia were within the genus, then those characteristics would belong solely to the species or to the genus as a whole. In the first case, if only pigeons were wild things, then the terms "wild things" would have no meaning or extension other than "pigeon", and differentiating doves by the characteristic of wildness is simply to differentiate doves by the character of being doves. If the differentia existed only within the species, the only way the species could be differentiated from the genus would be by tautology (essentially saying a dove is different from other pigeons because it is a dove). In the second case, no differentia would separate doves from other pigeons, collapsing the species into the genus.

The basic problem: being, it seems, cannot be one because it abolishes all difference, and it cannot be manifold because it abolishes all unity. It is from this problematic, the apparent tension in being between the one and the many, that Aristotle's metaphysics takes its direction.

St. Basil the Great on the Rich Young Ruler

From St. Basil's Sermon to the Rich:

For if [the rich young ruler's claims] were true, that [he had] kept from [his] youth the commandment of love, and have given to each person as much as to [himself], how has it come to [him], this abundance of money? For it takes wealth to care for the needy: a little paid out for the necessity of each person you take on, and all at once everything gets parceled out, and is spent upon them. Thus, the man who loves his neighbor as himself will have acquired no more than what his neighbor has; whereas you, visibly, have acquired a lot. Where has this come from? Or is it not clear, that it comes from making your private enjoyment more important than helping other people? Therefore, however much you exceed in wealth, so much so do you fall short in love: else long since you’d have taken care to be divorced from your money, if you had loved your neighbor.

One wonders what his judgment on the ethic of capitalism might look like.

Metaphor in Practice

"[The Israelites] waged war against a foreign nation. The text calls those combining against them Amalekites. For the first time the Israelites were drawn out fully armed in battle array... Moses, standing on a hilltop far away from the furor of battle, was looking up toward heaven with a friend stationed on either side of him.

"Then we hear from the history the following marvel. When Moses raised his hands to heaven, those under his command prevailed against their enemies, but when he let them down, the army began to give in to the foreigner's assault." St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (HarperSanFransisco, 2006) 17.

"Moses's holding his hands aloft signifies the contemplation of the Law with lofty insights; his letting them hang to earth signifies the mean and lowly literal exposition and observance of the Law." Id, 75.

St. Gregory's bold assertion of the superiority of the non-literal exposition of the Law of the Old Testament over the "mean and lowly literal exposition and observance of the Law" doubtless runs contrary to the instincts of some of the hermeneutic traditions arising after the Protestant Reformation. The literal exposition tends to lead to a more univocal meaning, regulated by the text itself, giving epistemological certainty as opposed to a method that would lead to a multiplicity of meanings that must be judged on the basis of extra-biblical criteria. If the Bible serves as the epistemological foundation of all things Christian, then the Christian would be desirous of finding a method that grants definite certainty, that can be clear enough to delineate those beliefs and practices which may be permitted, and those that may not be. St. Gregory's hermeneutic undermines this certainty.

Another objection may be lodged: the metaphorical meaning of a text abstracts away from any practical value, perhaps for the purpose of freeing the reader from the text's demands, and allowing the text to be reshaped to fit the reader's own purposes, clearing a way for man to usurp God's own word; or, to put it more simply, the metaphorical meaning requires only that one understand, not that one's life be conformed.

Both objections recklessly presuppose the existence of a set meaning that can be elicited from Scripture -- or any other text -- in isolation from both the context in which the text came to be and the context in which the text gets read; epistemological certainty belonging more to the former, and the accusation of mutinous abstraction going more to the latter. That meaning can be constituted and grasped without taking into account the contexts of significance in which the work was produced and in which it is read surely ignores the traditions one necessarily must rely on in understanding the texts (i.e., extra-biblical hermeneutic devices such as: "interpret the unclear passages by the clear ones"), and the obvious fact that reading Scripture itself without the intent to utilize other forms of tradition produces far less epistemological certainty than those who intentionally make extensive use of tradition in Biblical exposition, judging by the continual fragmentation of those who believe in the strict form of "sola scriptura" (a version not really held by most of the original Reformers) and the relative unity of those who adhere to a more traditional exposition.

One can, however, hold that tradition has its place in interpreting Scripture, yet nevertheless privilege literal readings over metaphorical readings--Luther and Calvin would more in this camp than the one above. The reason for St. Gregory's privilege does not, however, arise from a tendency towards the abstract, but rather from quite the opposite. The metaphorical reading of both the Law and histories of the Old Testament has its high place precisely because of its superior practical value.

St. Gregory's intention in, for example, his exposition of Moses' life does not seek simply to find those principles by which Moses lived in his time and place and, by understanding these reflectively, to instruct his readers to live by those same principles in their own time; Gregory wishes to instruct us how we may be raised by the daughter of a Pharaoh, be faced with a burning bush, ascend a mountain to see God's back, or again what it would mean to kill an Egyptian and flee to the desert, to turn water into blood, and to part the Red Sea. In his analysis, then, the events recorded in the history should not be used as fact patterns from which we might derive rules for living (and here, any fact pattern might do as well as another), but rather the history ought to be lived out by imitation; Gregory does not limit the language of participation to the metaphysical conception of the soul's union of God alone, he extends it to those great men of God which we would be well served to emulate. In a way, we must not only live out Moses' principles, but live his life by means of analogy.

How Gregory works this out with regard to the specific events in the history of Moses must be understood as one reads his Life of Moses; for our purposes, we need only grasp the general intent behind his exposition. He reads the history non-literally in order to determine how we are to fight the Amelikites when they no longer exist, or scale Mount Sinai after leading a nation out of Egypt. Gregory's use of metaphor arises not out of any lack of confidence in the relevance of the lives of those who lived long ago, but precisely in order to understand the relevance in each detail of such a life.

Looked at this way, the process of extracting from the history a rule that Moses lived by, even something as simple as "trust in God", makes the history more distant to its practical application and involves a greater process of abstraction than does living the history by analogizing one's own life to that of Moses. A metaphorical reading is not, therefore, more empty and abstract than a literal reading, but eminently more practical, and neither is a metaphorical reading, properly performed, an imposition of one's own intentions on the text and a freeing oneself of the text's demands; rather, it necessarily involves subjecting oneself to Scripture's demands, reforming one's intentions, and actually living out the history by way of analogy.

Knowledge in the Age of Information

Martin Heidegger once instructed his students that "[i]t is advisable, therefore, that you postpone reading Nietzsche for the time being, and first study Aristotle for ten to fifteen years." To one uninitiated in the field of ancient philosophy (and perhaps to some in that field) this demand might seem absurd. Why devote so much time in studying a writer who live thousands ago in order to understand someone who lived thousands of years later? Even if one were to consider a thinker worthwhile, would it really take ten years to understand what he said?

There are many causes for reflection here, but in grasping one distinction, we might understand both Heidegger's demand is eminently reasonable and why it seems so incredible. That distinction is, in general terms, the difference between knowledge and information.

The difference here should not be understood primarily in terms of the content of information on the one hand and the content of knowledge on the other: information about Aristotle and knowledge of Aristotle might be similar in terms of what they reference. However, information and knowledge both should be understood as products of different processes of reflection, and products that cannot be understood without grasping their form of production.

Information lies most conspicuously within the bounds of modern experience, and so we begin there. What do we do when we gather information? Most simply, and perhaps most commonly, we look up the information on the internet. Before that, we search for information in file folders and dossiers. Some great differences stand out between a library filing system and the Google search engine, but they are similar enough in that the information lies, ready to hand, uncovered and understood by the cursory act of viewing.

What of the information gained by such devices? Most obviously, information is that which the search process yields (we can almost add: "and nothing else"). The information, while it keeps its referential character, is itself a tool, a means to an end. The information yielded by the search has its own use-value, the use-value being completely circumscribed the the intent of the inquirer.

Information has a discrete, finite, and -- most importantly -- objective character. The information is "out there" to be found; it exists and has its existence in full apart from the one who seeks it. Words on a page, numbers in an Excel file; their character as information is not changed when someone reads it. One finds information much as one finds a natural resource.

The search for information determines both what information shows up and the significance of that information. Like a natural resource, information is mined, processed, and consumed. Information, therefore, is easily come by; once one has found it, one has understood it. One then moves on to the next question; in this way, information is gathered progressively.

Information cannot be distinguished from the process of finding and using information. At all points the "informational intent" delimits what shows up; and whatever shows up as useful is information. The question asked is always fully understood in the asking; the answer given is always readily digested.

Knowledge, by comparison, is enigmatic. It too is tied to a process. One comes across knowledge of, say, Aristotle, by reading him and reading about him, by hearing lectures on him, by discussing his ideas with others. However, even when one has heard an answer to a question, one has not necessarily understood it. One can ask "does Aristotle believe in the existence of God", and receive an affirmative answer; but although one has asked the question and listened to the answer one has not necessarily understood, precisely because one has not fully understood the question. After all, when Aristotle argues for the existence of God, what does he mean by God? And what would it mean for God to exist? And, what would existence mean in light of the question? The informational impulse here immediately understands the question and the answer, already understanding what "God" means (and blithely indifferent to what Aristotle thinks the word means), and by not returning to the question, the informational impulse blocks off the possibility of knowledge.

One of my best philosophy professors once said that philosophy was the perpetual asking the question of what philosophy is. Philosophy does not fit the model of a progressive science, which begins from a definite starting point, and, gathering information by stages, corrects itself and proceeds ever upward in both the quantity of information gathered and its accuracy. Instead, philosophy constantly returns to its basic questions. An answer might be given, and it may be correct, but this does not make it a good answer. A good answer directs the philosopher to previously unnoticed folds of the question. The dialectic of knowledge follows a cycle: from question to answer, then back to the question.

Unlike the information yielded by a search, an answer cannot be divorced from its referential character; an answer has in itself no use-value. The answer serves only to plunge one back into the perplexity of the question, and often its use is only to return one squarely to where one started. The lack of a use-value, to return to our example of natural resources, cannot be processed and consumed, it must be cared for and cultivated.

Knowledge cannot be characterized as objective, the sort of thing that anyone could find and, in the finding, easily understand. Rather, knowledge rather confounds the means by which it may be obtained.

The difference between information and knowledge may be analogized to the Aquinas' distinction between ordinary food and Eucharistic food. Taking the Aristotelian account of eating as that activity which destroys the formal integrity of the food, turning the material of the food instead to the activity of the body, and forcing upon the material the form of the body (incompletely though, for the material gradually reasserts its own nature, resulting the the death and disintegration of the person), Aquinas inverts the formula: spiritual food, rather than having its sort of being destroyed and the material turned towards the activity of the soul that consumes it, retains its own form and turns the soul of him who consumes it towards the activity of that consumed--the body of Jesus Christ. Likewise, whereas the intent of the information-gathering process delimits in advance the nature of the information that shows up, the intent of the knowledge seeker, in the process of gaining knowledge, does not determine the object of its search, but is rather determined by it. In finding out what one seeks to know, one must learn to surpass the form of the question posed. The process of learning involves necessarily being at the mercy of what one seeks; we can think of Aristotle's image of the soul as being potentially all possible forms.

The process of learning, therefore, requires the student to change and develop not only what he knows, but how he knows and how he goes about knowing more. Knowledge isn't so much acquired as it is lived, and this explains why, for the Greek philosophers, virtue is a prerequisite for knowing. The student is wholly involved in the process of learning; he is, as it were, within the question itself. In order to know the answer, the student must realize the insufficiency of the way he asked the question. This task cannot be performed in a short period of time.

This explains why Heidegger instructs his students to spend so much time studying Aristotle. Coming to any true knowledge of Aristotle (or anyone worth understanding) does not consist in simply sketching out his positions, as one would sketch out the positions of a politician, nor does it consist in placing Aristotle in predetermined categories; it requires getting at the heart of Aristotle's philosophy by fully entering the cycle in which one's previous intent is confounded, and one is placed at the mercy of his dialectic.

The Penal Soul

If the surplus power possessed by the king gives rise to the duplication of his body, has not the surplus power exercised on the subjected body of the condemned man given rise to another type of duplication? That of a 'non-corporeal', a 'soul', as Mably called it. The history of the [works] of the punitive power would then be a genealogy of the modern 'soul'. Rather than seeing this soul as the reactivated remnants of an ideology, one would see it as the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body. It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished - and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are struck at a machine and observed for the rest of their lives. This is the historical reality of the soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint.

- Michel Foucault

What does it mean to say that the soul is born of punishment, supervision, and constraint? We might think of the soul as that activity in which a coherent identity gets formed. Often, this has been conceived as coming from within the inner potentiality of a human being, brought out successively through time as one's essence progressively manifests itself. However, the Aristotelian must also grant that any inner potentiality does not possess the power to manifest itself; rather, potency can only be brought into actuality by something already actual.

For the Christian tradition (and even for Aristotle), that actuality that calls the soul out from hidden potentiality and allows it to come into its own is God. God as pure act should not be thought of as one actual thing among others that comes alongside something such as the sole and "activates" it. God's immanence, especially as expressed in the doctrine of the imago Dei, exists "inside" the soul, bringing it to its own natural actuality from within.

Foucault's claim is quite different. The soul does not come from within, but from without. The soul is imposed by the principalities and powers of the world through acts of violence. The soul is that force exercised by power and the technics of repression. And rather than the soul enlivening the body, freeing it from inert materiality, the soul, as the product of the mechanics of power, imprisons the body.

The Structure of Motion in Aristotle's Cosmological Argument

Aristotle does not limit motion to change of place, to growth and decay, to alteration, or the like; for motion, while it encompasses these things, cannot be thought of as one sort of motion that all other sorts of motion can be reduced to (i.e., motion cannot be alteration, while all other forms of motion can be reduced to alteration). Neither can the sorts of motion, added together, tell us what motion itself itself is -- any more than listing different virtues can answer the question of what virtue itself is -- and so Aristotle must give an account of motion that goes beyond listing different sorts of motion, or collapsing different sorts of motion into a single kind of motion; or to put it another way, Aristotle must explain motion as such.

In III:1 of the Physics, Aristotle defines motion as "the being-at-work-staying-itself of whatever is potentially, just as such" (201a10-20) and again as the "being-at-work-staying-itself of what is potentially, whenever, being fully at work, it is at work not as itself but just as movable" (201a15-30). The definition might be formulated in a more paradoxical (and troubling) way: motion is the activity of potentiality; and thus one might conclude Aristotle's definition directly contradicts itself, for actuality and potentiality ought to be opposed to one another--at least on the superficial reading.

How would a potentiality be at work while remaining as a potentiality? Isn't potentiality precisely that which has not yet been actualized? Aristotle clarifies his definition by saying that he does not mean that a particular potentiality for a particular being constitutes motion, else we might say that to be brown constitutes motion; rather, motion is the activity of potentiality as potentiality. To take an example, a light-skinned person who rarely spends time in the sun can be called potentially tan, and while "being tanned" obviously does not constitute motion in its essence, neither -- precisely speaking -- does the becoming tan from being light-skinned constitute motion itself (though it is a motion). What, in the process of becoming tanned, constitutes motion itself? In any particular motion, motion itself must be present, accessible to us on reflection, and since we know that motion is the activity of potency as potency, we can ask: how, when a light-skinned person becomes tanned, does motion manifest itself as an activity of potency?

Motion cannot be inextricably tied to any particular potentiality, but it must be related to potentiality as such; and so we say that motion manifests itself in the fact that, while one becomes tanned, being light-skinned slides from actuality into potentiality. By always claiming, as it were, one contrary, and giving the other contrary to actuality, potentiality always keeps something for itself; for contraries cannot both be actual at one time (a person cannot at the same time be both light-skinned and tanned). Motion is the activity of potentiality's maintenance of its own reserve, and this can only be possible with finite beings. Motion does not consist in being light skinned or in being tanned, but in necessarily only being one at the same time, while potentially the other; and one cannot help but note that even potentiality, considered in itself, exists as an actuality.

This brings us back to the previous insight that potentiality and actuality cannot be opposed to one another, that potentiality, in order to be at all, must be actual; yet, in spite of this, one cannot simply conflate potentiality with actuality--the two must be considered distinct, although connected. In order to see the distinction, we must return to the problematic definition that seems to threaten the distinction between actuality and potentiality: potentiality, to be potentiality, must be actualized in the structure of motion. This can be reformulated as: motion is potentiality being itself actually. Aristotle goes a step further, defining motion in explicitly contradictory terms as an "incomplete being complete" (257b8-10), but rather than creating an impasse, when Aristotle defines motion in its most problematic form, he opens the way to altering the nature of the problem. Motion itself may be called a complete way of being incomplete, an actuality that preserves potentiality, not because motion cannot ever be abstracted from things (though it must always exist in them), but rather because it constitutes the being of composite things. The definition of motion as an incomplete being complete forms a bridge, for it points in two directions: motion in itself as the active maintenance of a reserve of potentiality (the potential maintained being the incomplete), and motion as always making possible an actual, composite being. not sure if this is what I'm trying to get at The two can only be separated in thought; for to be a composite being means to never be fully complete (i.e., fully actual), and to be a motion means to be completed only in the presence of a composite being that takes responsibility for the motion (as the first mover).

Motion's completeness is the composite being's incompleteness; this only says that motion finds its explanation in a being that takes responsibility for it, and the composite being only finds its being composite in the perpetual presence of the potentiality that motion preserves. Here a problem arises, for it seems as though I might be using "motion" equivocally: first as a particular motion, and second as motion itself (the structure of motion as motion). A particular motion, in order to be understood, requires a particular being to take responsibility for it (to be its first cause), but it does not seem as though composite being as such owes its being-composite to a particular motion (becoming tanned, changing location, and so on), but rather to motion as the preservation of potentiality. Note, however, that although motion finds its explanation only in a being that takes responsibility for motion, this does not immediately indicate that this being must be composite or that the motion is a particular motion. One can read Aristotle's definition of motion as creating a fissure in the ontic through which the ontological makes its appearance: particular motions may be explained in one way by reference to natural beings responsible for motion, while they may be explained in another way by motion as such; however, motion as such cannot be explained by particular motions, nor by reference to itself, but must be explained by its causes. Thus, the question of the cause of motion as such lies implicit in both particular motions and the structure of motion that makes composite beings possible. An important question arises at this juncture: does motion (not particular motions, but motion as such), which gives composite beings their being as composite, belong properly to the composite being itself, as an aspect of that being, or does it belong to something higher than the composite being itself, being given from another source (and it seems clear this source would be the cause of motion)? To put it a clearer way: can we call motion as motion prior to the composite beings in which motion constitutes their being as composite, or are composite beings ontologically prior to motion as motion? Can we call composite beings prior to their being, or must we call the being of composite beings ontologically prior? This line of questioning interrogates the possibility of the presence of the transcendent in the immanent as well as the basic character of their ontological relation. How Aristotle answers the question determines how he conceives of the ontological difference.

Aristotle begins his explanation of motion as such by first considering particular motions; considering the ontic first, to reach the ontological. The cause of motions must be explained by reference to a first mover that exists as a particular being cite where Aristotle makes this argument, and so we would suspect that the question of the cause of motion itself might move along similar lines; as said above, motion cannot be explained by particular motions, and so its cause must lie in itself, or in an external cause. If the first cause of motion itself (first, of course, in the ontological, not temporal sense) turns out to be a composite being, then composite beings would be ontologically prior to motion itself, and this would be the case if motion exists simply as a feature of composite beings.

In order to determine whether the cause of motion as such can be understood to be ontologically determined by motion itself, Aristotle moves back to the consideration of particular motions so that he might determine whether individual motions encompass their causes (that is, whether the causes of motions are themselves moved by the motion they cause). Some things seem to be obviously moved by something else, such as when a man moves a rock with a stick. In this case, the first mover must be said to be the man, not the stick, for the man bears responsibility for the motion of the rock, and the stick serves merely as an instrument; further, the motion of the rock, though caused by the man, did not move the man himself (the motion of the man moving the rock must be distinguished from the motion of the rock itself). From this, we might be led to conclude that the mover causes the motion, but remains outside of that motion. However, in some cases, it seems as though the moved thing moves itself. The man who moved the rock perhaps looks about for a stick to move the rock with, and this motion seems to originate within the moved thing itself (in this case, the man). Aristotle regards animals as paradigmatic cases for beings, and so the seeming self-motion of animals poses a particular problem if he wishes to maintain that the mover causes the motion without being moved by it. In order to establish that the mover must be unmoved by the motion caused, Aristotle must show that a self-moved mover in some way must be unmoved by the motion.

A self-moved mover must either move itself as a whole, or some part of the self-moved mover must move the whole mover. However, if a whole moves a whole, then the distinction between mover and moved collapses, for that which bears responsibility for the motion also undergoes the motion, and the causing motion and being caused are not two separate things, but one in the same; and -- as Aristotle points out earlier -- if it is possible to collapse the distinction between mover and moved, then teaching and learning could be the same--this cannot be true. An even more basic (though similar) problem arises if one says a whole moves itself as a whole: in order for a whole to be moved, it must be first potentially movable, then brought into motion by an actuality; but if the whole is moves itself, then it must be both be both potentially and actually in the same way at the same time. Therefore, a whole cannot move itself as a whole.

It follows that in a self moved thing some part must move the whole, but that part can move the whole in two ways: either by being moved itself, or by remaining unmoved; but if the part moves itself with the motion it causes in the whole, then the part may itself be viewed as a self-moved mover, in which mover and moved must again be distinct. Thus, the self-moved part that moves the whole can itself be viewed as a whole that must also be divided into a part that moves and a part that is moved, and so the only way to avoid an infinite regress would be to identify a part that moves the whole, but is itself unmoved. Since the part that causes motion does so not in a temporal sense, but in an ontological sense wherein that part causes motion by being primarily responsible for it, it would be irrational to say that there is nothing responsible for a motion. Therefore, even in self-moved movers, an unmoved mover causes the motion, and so the cause of motion in all moved things itself remains beyond the motion caused. Taking this logic from the ontic to the ontological, it follows that the cause of motion as such cannot itself be determined by motion, but must be outside composite being. Therefore, the being of composite beings, motion, is ontologically dependent not upon composite beings themselves, but upon a being that is beyond potentiality, and is itself purely actual.

The Irony of the Euthyphro

The irony of the Euthyphro as a whole consists in this: Euthyphro sought to defend his position that personal investment in justice was irrelevant, while being so personally invested in this argument that he was unable to give himself over to the demands of Socrates' philosophic dialectic.

Works of Art and Works of Nature

In our age of industrial technics we often find the distinction between natural things and man-made products blurred or erased; think, for instance, of how the project of artificial intelligence seeks to replicate a human mind -- a natural occurrence -- on computer hardware, as though the mind exists as an abstract form that can be freed from one physical instantiation and reconstituted in entirely different physical material. David Hume pointed out that Newton's design argument confused the cosmos with a mechanism, failing to consider that other analogies (such as that of an animal) might be even more appropriate, an error made more and more earnestly even by those who would later deny the design argument; and now society, living beings, and the cosmos as a whole suffer being conceived of as mechanisms that operate (or should operate) for maximal efficiency towards certain quantifiable results. However, it goes unquestioned -- and therefore, unproven -- whether the model of the machine can encompass the reality of living beings, or of society, or of the cosmos as a whole; and Aristotelian phenomenology makes a strong case against such a confusion, for the works of the artisan are ontologically distinct from the works of nature.

Aristotle gives an initial definition of natural things as those things that have an internal impulse towards motion, while stating that artifacts lack such an internal disposition:

For [the things of nature] has in itself a source of motion and rest, either in place, or by growth and shrinkage, or by alteration; but a bed or a cloak, or any other such kind of thing there is, in the respect in which it has happened upon each designation and to the extent that it is from art, has no innate impulse of change at all. (Physics 192b10-20)

At this juncture in Aristotle's investigation into nature one can safely think of motion as change generally, rather than as primarily locomotion; and so Aristotle characterizes as natural things which have an internal principle of change. Natural things change in a way appropriate to the sort of thing they are (for example, when a tree grows upward towards the sunlight, this change constitutes an expression of what it means to be a tree), so the internal principle of motion can be understood as the sort of motion that belongs properly to a thing by virtue of what it is. Some motions can be said to be natural and others unnatural: when a person lays down to sleep, the motion of laying down and the change from being awake to being asleep arises from within that person, and can be understood as an outward manifestation of that person and of human beings generally; however, if a person is knocked to the floor by something striking him, this motion is unnatural in that the striking thing imposes the motion from without.

Natural and unnatural motion can happen only to a natural thing, while a work of art (here understood in the broad sense of craftsmanship) does not have its own natural form of motion. The artifact undergoes change both from within and without: within from the material out of which the artisan formed it, and without from the design of the artisan. The work of the artisan necessarily constitutes a certain violence: a tree, formerly having its own nature and principle of growth, suffers being cut down and hewn into the form of a bed frame; the nature of being a bed-frame does not belong to the tree itself, but must be imposed from without, and the wood of the bed will not strive to maintain the integrity of the bed through time, but will decay as wood does and eventually return to the earth. Natural things are at work being and maintaining themselves in a way that incorporates the material of other things -- think of how when an animal eats an apple it destroys the nature of the apple and turns the material towards itself -- but in the case of natural things, it is the nature or form of the thing itself which recruits foreign material into its own nature; however, the artifact does not recruit material into its own way of maintaining itself, rather the artisan forces the material and the form together from the outside--artificially.

The internal principle of motion or change constitutes the means by which the being maintains itself in its being (Heidegger calls this "care"), and so the natural changes proper to a thing such as a tree maintain it in its being: the tree grows up from a seed, pushing through the ground, and opens itself up to the world as a tree. By shedding its leaves during the winter, growing them during the summer, reaching ever upwards, and dropping seeds down the the earth, the tree manifests itself as a tree, the tree is its own striving towards manifestation; it initiates its natural changes from within and expresses them outwardly, and in this activity has its being. An artifact suffers changes, for it has no internal principle of motion or change that allows it to outwardly express its inward possibilities, and so, every once in a while, it must be repaired or replaced; the artifact has no intrinsic way to be at work maintaining itself or striving towards its own expression, but only the natural tendencies of the things out of which it is constructed, and the efforts of the artisan to force and reinforce a functional structure upon it. A bed does not work at keeping its nature intact by actively looking after itself and recruiting new material into its active being, rather the wood rots and the artisan replaces it or makes another bed. Thus, if the being of a thing consists in the work to persist over time that it initiates from within itself, we can say that artifacts, in the purest sense, do not possess an authentic being, except insofar as they imitate natural things.

This difference between natural things and artificial things ought not be considered to be "merely" mental, having no hold in nature as it is in itself: the highest manifestation of each natural being occurs in its being understood by mind, for here the natural thing exists at its most purely actual; beings can be understood -- which simply means: brought to their highest actuality -- when one knows the "why" of their being (194b20-25). In order to further elucidate the ontological difference between natural beings and artifacts, we should consider that to which both sorts of things owe their being, and how they differ. When we inquire into the sources of a thing's being, we inquire into what bears responsibility for that thing, and we know in advance that what bears responsibility for the being of a natural thing must be, in some sense, the natural thing itself; for the natural thing's being is nothing other than its effort to persist and express itself over time, and a natural thing must (as we said above) initiate this activity from within. However, if we wish to inquire further to the responsibility for the thing's presence, we see that the thing can be said to be responsible for its being in several different ways.

In order for a thing to hold itself in being, it must have something to hold together and to recruit when it needs more material; when the tree acts on itself, we mean "tree" and "itself" in slightly different ways, for the tree in the primary sense is its being-at-work-staying-itself, while the tree in the second sense is that out of which the tree is made. The former acts upon the latter, and we call natural beings composite, having an active and a passive part. Motion, in its highest sense, is the preservation of the thing's potencies as such, and so motion guarantees a reserve of material for the thing to act upon.

Second, in order for a thing to hold itself in being, it must have something that it holds together, and this something must be intelligible; for example, the sheep dog chases after its charges and thereby maintains that by which one recognizes it as being a "sheep dog" and which all individual sheep dogs possess. What the natural being holds together and offer to the external world belongs to all things of its kind, and does not depend on an individual instantiation of itself; for example, if one sheep dog perishes, one can still recognize what distinguishes sheep dogs as sheep dogs. Aristotle calls this the look that one discloses in speech; Aristotle means by this formulation what occurs when one says "that looks like a sheep dog."

As a finite thing must have a beginning that we call coming-into-being, and this change must begin at a certain point, something must be responsible for initiating the coming into being of the thing. In order for a change to occur, something must cause it to occur, and in the case of the change of coming into being from not-being, the thing responsible cannot be the thing brought into being, for then it would precede itself; and therefore, the individual thing -- while it can be responsible for its changes once it exists -- cannot be responsible for its own coming into being. In works of art, we rightly call the craftsman responsible for the coming into being of the artifact, but in works of nature, the thing responsible can only be a thing of the same sort (a sheepdog must come into being from other sheepdogs); one can distinguish natural things from unnatural things by asking whether the thing was brought into being by the same sort of thing.

However, a thing undergoes other changes other than coming into being, and if these other changes are natural then they will be initiated from within the thing itself, rather than from without. We have already mentioned several marks of natural things -- that they initiate motion from within, that another thing of their own sort is responsible for their coming into being, that their form and matter belong to one another -- but all these should be drawn together under a final sort of responsibility: that wholeness towards which the thing directs its activity of maintaining itself through time. The three sorts of responsibility discussed above are likewise subordinate to this kind of responsibility, the actively self-maintained wholeness of the thing that Aristotle calls the for-the-sake-of-which; this can be seen when the sheepdog corrals the sheep, when it escapes from the powerful predator, when it eats--all of these aim towards the maintenance of the whole sheepdog under which are gathered all other aspects of the sheepdog.

This final aspect only natural things possess, for the responsibility for the presence of an artifact cannot be brought under this final cause, as it lacks the requisite unity: the material has no inherent desire to be brought together into the intelligible form of the artifact, and so the intelligible form does not belong to the matter that suffers to receive it; neither does that which is responsible for the coming into being of the artifact manifest the same intelligible form that he or she brings into being in the artifact; and certainly the artifact does not actively maintain the harmony of these aspects, directing them towards the wholeness that they help constitute. Aristotle calls this wholeness the nature of a thing, and it is precisely the presence of nature that determines works of nature in their being, and likewise it is precisely the lack of this nature that determines works of art in their being.

Metaphysical Naturalism Is a Crude Form of Idealism

Metaphysical naturalism, the view that the hard sciences possess a rightful claim over all other disciplines regarding the explication of the nature of reality, has spread from scientists through the popular culture and even into some quarters of philosophy. One easily forgives the scientist who overestimates the limits of his or her craft and one hardly faults the common person for being overawed by the accomplishments of the scientific enterprise, but philosophers – who ostensibly ought to be aware of the particular demands of metaphysical inquiry – ought not accept these claims so easily. After all, within the confines of modern science one cannot even make claims as to the metaphysical status of scientific theories, such as whether science treats of things in themselves or of a chain of causes conditioned by transcendental categories, because as soon as one takes up such questions, one has moved from the territory of science to that of philosophy. Therefore, the philosopher ought not simply accept the scientific picture of the world as an entirely true picture – though perhaps, to borrow Heidegger's distinction, the philosopher might accept the scientific picture as correct – but neither ought the philosopher dismiss it out of hand simply because it originated in the field of natural science rather than in the field of philosophy. In order to subject this sort of metaphysics to philosophical scrutiny, this essay will focus on an area in which the tension between metaphysical materialism and its opponents is particularly palpable: the question whether the mind is identical with the brain. I will argue that the metaphysical implications of identity theory have not necessarily been thoroughly thought out and lead to a sort of metaphysical dualism which is untenable, or else to the sort of idealism which would require the scientist to give up on his or her status as an empiricist.

To the metaphysical naturalist, science appears to promise fairly complete answers in most of the areas it has applied itself; however, the explanation of the mind in naturalistic terms is notoriously difficult, and might be seen as the last holdout for the opponents of materialism. As J. J. C. Smart puts it: “There does seem to be, so far as science is concerned, nothing in the world but increasingly complex arrangements of physical constituents. All except for one place: in consciousness.”(1) However, one must note that the mind ought not be considered one item (among a determinate number of other items) that resists – at the outset, at least – scientific explanation; rather, the activity of the mind functions as a necessary prerequisite for the scientific explanation of anything at all—scientific inquiry as such is a particular kind of mental process. So the optimism that science has explained, say, 99% of things in the universe and will therefore probably explain the other 1% that includes the mind overlooks the constitutive role mind plays in the scientific construction of the universe. It would be a mistake to suppose that the mind will be eventually explained just as scientists have explained everything else for the obvious reason that scientific inquiry is bound in a very peculiar fashion to the workings of the mind; the activity of the mind cannot be extirpated from the activity of scientific inquiry in a way that would allow mental activity to ever become a mere object of investigation. This does not mean that the mind cannot be explained in a naturalistic way, and so we can proceed through Smart's argument without error as long as we remain aware of the peculiar relation of the mind to scientific explanation and avoid the unreflective talk of “nomological danglers”.

Identity theory depends upon the distinction between the “is” of correlation and the “is” of identity; identity theorists do not wish merely to argue that mental states are correlated with brain states, but that mental states are identical with brain states. The weaker claim that whenever a person has a mental state, that person also has a brain state – an entirely reasonable claim – does not go far enough for Smart; the mental state must be identical with the brain state. To put it succinctly: “Sensations are nothing over and above brain processes.”(2)

As Smart notes, this immediately calls forth the obvious problem that one can talk about mental processes without knowing about brain processes, and so he must distinguish between what the common person means by “mental process” and what mental processes actually are. In fact, the identity theorist must say that what the common person actually refers to is a brain process insofar as he or she refers to anything at all. Both U. T. Place and Smart refer to the way in which lightning, rather than being thrown down from the heavens by Zeus as an ancient Greek might have thought, is (in the sense of identity, not merely correlation) the discharge of electricity; the way in which heat must be identified as molecular motion; or some other natural phenomena which readily admits to reduction to a scientific model. U. T. Place declares that the phrase “'consciousness is a process in the brain' in my view is neither self-contradictory nor self evident; it is a reasonable scientific hypothesis, in the way that the statement 'Lightning is a motion of electric charges' is a reasonable scientific hypothesis.”(3) Likewise, Smart remarks:

When I say that a sensation is a brain process or that lightning is an electrical discharge, I am using “is” in the sense of strict identity (just as in the – in this case necessary – proposition “7 is identical with the smallest prime number greater than 5.”) When I say that a sensation is a brain process or that lightning is an electrical discharge I do not mean just that the sensation is somehow spatially or temporally continuous with the brain process or that lightning is just spatially or temporally continuous with the discharge.

Both Place and Smart base their identity theory in the analogy that just as natural phenomena appear one way, scientists have actually discovered them to be something else entirely, and both presume that natural phenomena can be reduced to the corresponding scientific explanation, leaving nothing left over. Therefore, while one might agree that one aspect of lightning might be an electrical discharge, or that one aspect of mental activity might be the functioning of the brain, this does not go far enough for the identity theorists; just as lightning is electrical discharge and no more, so mental processes are brain functions and no more. At this point, one can begin to see the outlines of a wider metaphysical view of the world surfacing, which, under further analysis, might turn out to be quite suspect.

If identity theorists wish to offer the scientific model of the universe as an exhaustive explanation of the world,(4) then they propose a dualistic ontology which posits that things do not appear in everyday life in the way that they exist in reality—which signifies nothing else than a sort of revival of Kant's distinction between phenomenon and noumenon. Thus, the common man might say, “my feelings toward my pet goldfish sure don't feel like neurons firing in my head”, but who is he to know? After all, just as the true nature of lightning cannot be conveyed through the perceptual experience of lightning, neither does the apperception of affection reveal the ontological basis of mental states. This means that what appears can be devoid of what truly exists, that phenomenon can be devoid of noumenon. Thus, one can find within the ordinary apperceptual experience of affection absolutely nothing about the neurological process that supposedly constitutes the reality of the experience (remember, we aren't talking about physical processes which accompany mental processes, but physical processes and nothing else).

Ought we to consider the division between what appears and what exists absolute? We have established that we appercieve mental states without any hint of their supposed “true nature”, but perhaps mental states alone do not convey their true nature, perhaps the true nature of externally existing things does become accessible through their appearances. Taking Place's example of a cloud, we might say that although the ancients might have thought of clouds as fairly solid objects, one finds on closer examination – through the help of a hot air balloon – that clouds are not solid at all, but droplets of water. In this example, the true nature of the cloud gets revealed through the perceptual experience of clouds, and humans were formerly deceived (for the purposes of our story) because they didn't have the requisite technology to get the needed vantage point to reveal the true nature of the clouds. However a few problems present themselves. In the first case, why ought the closer appearance of clouds be privileged over the way they appear from the ground? What reason do we have for regarding the more accurate view of clouds as the one from the air? One answer that might be given: things appear most fully to human beings “within arm's reach”. I am not entirely satisfied by this answer, as I think a counter-argument might be made that the way in which clouds appear in the usual course of human activities ought to be considered the truer view; however, for the purpose of this discussion, we can accept the “arm's reach” explanation.

The second, more significant problem regarding the cloud example occurs when one says that the true nature of the cloud consists not in the small droplets I might catch in my fingers from within the hot air balloon (and therefore, the droplets I can feel and see), but in the accumulation of H20, suspended in the air by certain pressures, reacting to gravity in certain ways, and so on. Nothing in my perceptual experience of the water droplets forming on my hand gives me anything like the molecule H20, and if one wishes to say that the true nature of water can be exhausted in that molecular form, then the true nature of the cloud again exists nowhere in the perceptual experience of it. This suspicion only gets confirmed more thoroughly if we consider again the favorite example of identity theorists: lightning. If, while I am gliding my hand through the cloud before me while riding in my hot air balloon and trying in vain to somehow perceive two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, my hot air balloon gets struck by lightning, then not only do I not perceive lightning any better than from a distance – indeed, it seems as though I might have more clear view from a distance – but I don't see anything like an electrical discharge; instead I see a blinding flash, hear a crash, perhaps smell the fabric of my hot air balloon burning, and so on. Neither the perceptual experience of the cloud nor that of lightning gives me anything like H20 or electricity, and so one would expect to find this true of all natural phenomena. Indeed, if we were to get down to the basic constituents of the physical universe, we find quantum theory proposing things which cannot be observed (in principle) as basic to reality—and even claiming that the whole of things within space and time are held in being by super-spatial and super-temporal quantum strings vibrating. If this turns out to be true, the universe as a whole would have its true reality in something that can be neither perceived nor even imagined, but only modeled mathematically. Therefore, I think it safe to say that the identity theorist's metaphysics posits an absolute divide between appearances and reality, meaning that reality cannot become available through perception.

Though Place and Smart might maintain an absolute division between phenomenon and noumenon, one sees that they cannot regard the noumenal (as Kant did) as absolutely beyond knowledge, but rather precisely as that in which the true natures of things become known. This brings us to a peculiar turn: the kind of materialism which the identity theorists advocate – wherein the universe as it shows up in the hard sciences exhausts the whole of its reality – turns out to be a kind of idealism, in that reality is constituted by ideal models which cannot be given in perception, and while transcendental idealism does not regard either the pole of appearances or the pole of reality as more real than its opposite, identity theorists must deny any ontological status to appearance and instead maintain that scientific constructions exhaust the whole of the real. This is the full metaphysical consequence of declaring that lightning is electronic discharge and nothing else, that water is H20 and nothing else, and that mental processes are brain processes and nothing else. However, the identity theorist might protest that while hydrogen atoms cannot be perceived, brain processes can be perceived through the use of mental imaging equipment. In this case we must note that even if mental processes could be observed, the more basic (and therefore more real, on the materialist view) physical constituents still stand beyond the possibility of anything other than mathematical modeling. Secondly, and more importantly if we wish to maintain an absolute distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal, one does not really perceive brain processes when one views a CAT scan any more than one observes a duck when one sees the word “duck.” The image that the brain scan reveals stands in for the brain process; it represents it in the same way way atomic force microscopy generates an image that represents an atom. A process itself cannot be given in strictly sensuous experience any more than a cause could be (as Hume famously observed).

Although one might find it ironic that a philosophical position which purports to be empirical in fact entails a radically idealistic ontology that denies the reality of sensuous perception per se, this does not yet constitute an argument against identity theory. I would suppose that Smart or Place might be willing to give up on the strict claim that natural phenomena must be identified with the scientific explanation of that phenomena and nothing over and above that, since it leads rather obviously to the idealism I have been expounding, but of course I can't speak for them. And this would require them to give up identity theory. So I will end my formal argument here and – as I don't have space to make another rigorous argument – instead suggest some reasons why one should be very suspicious of identity theory's tacit ontology.

In order to convince a person that their perceptual experience can never convey reality, but instead can only stand in for ideal models beyond any possible perception, one would need – as the “man on the street” might say to the enthusiastic identity theorist – a damn good argument. In fact, I am suspicious that any argument could convince anyone that the way in which we see and encounter the world around us ought to be considered an illusion; the sheer force of the world's truth presses in through perception over against any attempt to deny it—indeed, the philosopher might need a good deal of peace and quiet to deny the reality of what threatens to distract him from his studies. Neither Smart nor Place offer a convincing argument to consider appearances void of reality, they simply assume this to be the case.

One way to disprove identity theory might consist in a phenomenological investigation which would lay out precisely how science arises as a function of the consciousness, and would lay out the ways in which this sort of consciousness depends on the “life-world” (as Husserl called it). At this point, one could examine whether or not science has – by virtue of the type of consciousness it is – the capacity to make metaphysical claims about the world, and one would perhaps demonstrate from this that science necessarily deals with constructs which have a lesser claim to reality than, for example, philosophical claims. In this way, one could show that metaphysical naturalism arises from a misunderstanding of the basic nature of science. Of course, fleshing out these arguments would have to take place in a further essay.

____________________________________
1.J. J. C. Smart, p. 60.
2. Smart, 62.
3. Place, 56.
4. As consistently as possible, I will use the term “universe” to refer to the scientific model of the world used by physics, and “world” to refer to the lived-in phenomenal world—by which I mean nothing more than the world as it ordinarily shows up for us in everyday life.

Derrida on Sacrifice and Modern Society

The Sacrifice of Isaac is an abomination in the eyes of all, and it should continue to be seen for what it is--atrocious, criminal, unforgivable; Kierkegaard insists on that. The ethical point of view must remain valid: Abraham is a murderer. However, is not the same spectacle of this murder, which seems untenable in the dense and rhythmic briefness of its theatrical moment, at the same time the most common event in the world? Is it not inscribed in the structure of our existence to the extent of no longer even constituting an event? It will be said that it would be most improbable for the sacrifice of Isaac to be repeated in our day; and it certainly seems that way. We can hardly imagine a father taking his son to be sacrificed on the top of the hill at Montmartre. If God didn't send a lamb as a substitute or an angel to hold back his arm, there would still be an upright prosecutor, preferable with an expertise in Middle Eastern violence, to accuse him of infanticide or first-degree murder; and if a psychiatrist who was both a little bit psychoanalysis and a little bit journalist were to declare that the father was "responsible", carrying on as if psychoanalysis had done nothing to upset the order of discourse on intention, conscience, good will, etc., the criminal father would have no chance of getting away with it. He might claim that the wholly Other ordered him to do it, and perhaps in secret (how would he know that?) in order to test his faith, but it would make no difference. Everything is organized to insure that this man would be condemned by any civilized society. On the other hand, the smooth functioning of such a society, the monotonous complacency of its discourses on morality, politics, and the law, and the very existence of rights (whether public, private, national, or international), are in no way perturbed by the fact that, because of the structure of the laws of the market that society has instituted and controls, because of the mechanisms of external debt and other comparable inequities, that same "society" puts to death or (but failing to help someone in distress only counts for a minor difference) allows to die of hunger and disease tens of millions of children (those relatives or fellow humans that ethics or the discourse of the rights of man refers to) without any moral or legal tribunal ever being considered competent to judge such a sacrifice, the sacrifice of the other to avoid being sacrificed oneself. Not only does such a society participate in this incalculable sacrifice, it actually organizes it.

-Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death.

QOTD

"The most sophisticated inventions are boring if they do not lead to an exacerbation of the Mystery concealed by what we discover, what is revealed to us. The powerful penetrating ability of the human mind uncovers with an undreamed-of insistence, yet what it uncovers is right away seized by the everyday and by understanding of being as in principle already fully uncovered and cleared, that understanding which at a stroke turns today's mystery into tomorrow's common gossip and triviality."

Jan Patocka, "Is Technological Civilization Decedant, and Why?"

The Imitation of the Divine In Aristotle

In order to gain knowledge of divine circularity in the simplest way, we will start with how human beings come to understand the divine, rather than how the divine understands itself. The question this essay takes up: to what extent is human participation in the divine contemplative? And, as a corollary, to what extent does the contemplative life exclude the “merely human” life (i.e., the political, familial, etc.). Lear formulates this problem by asserting that, according to Aristotle, the philosopher reaches a point where he must choose between the higher life of the divine and the lower life of the human. I will argue that this dilemma can and should be avoided in order to remain consistent with the general drift of Aristotle's thought, and that divine participation and political interaction can be mutually complementary.

The argument will proceed along the following lines: First, we will examine Aristotle's account of thinking as it relates to the actuality of form. Second, we will examine Aristotle's prime mover, with an emphasis on the account from the Metaphysics. After this we will be in a position to critique Lear's position about the impossibility of a life that is both political and contemplative. Aristotle's epistemology differs very importantly from post-Cartesian epistemology in that he does not sharply divide the thinker and the object of thought. Whereas dualism holds that the object of thought stands outside the mind and gets replicated within the inner space of the consciousness (and thereby reduces truth to the “accuracy” of the mental image to the external object), Aristotle instead holds that in reflective thought the thinking of an object and that object itself cannot be distinguished (De Anima II:1 413a4-7).

Aristotle's epistemological position depends on his ontology; the highest actuality of a thing lies in the thinking of it, rather than in “the thing itself” apart any apprehension of it.

Aristotle famously distinguishes between the form and matter of a substance, and the form generally corresponds to the thing's actuality, while the matter corresponds to the thing's potentiality. A substance, though it always shows the wholeness of its form in a way, nevertheless often fails to manifest it explicitly. If we think of the frog Lear uses as an example, we see that “Kermit” manifests his frog form to different degrees at different times. When Kermit was a tadpole his frog-nature was not as actual as it is when Kermit grows to be a full-grown adult frog; when Kermit sleeps, he does not actualize his frog-nature to the degree he does when he hops from lily pad to lily pad (Lear, 118). According to Aristotle, Kermit never fully actualizes his frog-form, although he possesses it (and has being by virtue of it) at all times, for Kermit cannot understand what it means to be a frog. However, this does not mean that frog-form cannot be fully actualized; frog-form gets most fully actualized in the active contemplation of what it means to be a frog. Kermit's frogness is potentially what the mind makes actual in the contemplation of the nature of frogs. This ought not be construed as saying that the frog-form is an inert potentiality which the mind actualizes, for form is actuality and mind does not act upon it so much as receive it. As Lear observes, since we cannot distinguish between the object of thought (frog-form) and the thinking of it, we can say that in the mind frog-form thinks itself—contemplation is the “self-understanding of the frog form!” (Lear 131). The highest actuality of a form is the contemplation of that form, and therefore mind cannot be said to be incidental to nature as a whole, but in some sense constitutive of it. One must take care here to avoid construing Aristotle as an idealist in the modern sense; for the mind which constitutes the world is not in any straightforward sense a human mind.

The contemplation carried out by human beings relies on perceptual, inner-worldly engagement with the things thought of. Thus, though active thinking brings out the full actuality of, for example, Kermit's frog-nature (or, probably more accurately, provides the space within which Kermit's frog-nature can fully express itself) human contemplation depends upon the things encountered in order that it might happen at all. However, human beings stand out from nature as the only sub-lunar beings who possess the ability to think. Aristotle regards this ability to think as not merely human, but as divine. If the being of things cannot be separated from their highest actuality, and the highest of actuality is thinking, then the being of things establishes itself in the activity of contemplation. But if contemplation belongs to human beings alone, and human beings depend so heavily on things in order to think them, Aristotle's ontology begins to appear quite frail.

Aristotle diverges from transcendental idealism in the sense that he does not believe reality to be divided into the phenomenal and the noumenal in such a way that mind must impose its processes upon the noumenal in order to make it intelligible as phenomena. Rather than attribute to the mind this kind of computational conversion process, Aristotle regards the reality of the things which we think of as already constituted in mind, and therefore human minds participate in a Mind which transcends the shortcomings of composite beings. Mind does constitute the reality of nature (as its full actuality) in a way which encompasses the whole of the cosmos, and this mind Aristotle calls the unmoved mover.

At this juncture we would do well to consider the relation of actuality to potentiality, for, as stated above, the full actuality of a substance is the contemplation of that substance, and so when Aristotle posits the unmoved mover he declares the being of the cosmos to be pure actuality. Put another way, the being of the cosmos cannot be separated from the source of its actuality—which is the unmoved mover. This view requires that actuality be ontologically primary to potency, and if this proves false, Aristotle's doctrine of the unmoved mover stands in immediate peril.

In Metaphysics Λ:6, Aristotle makes a brief argument for the primacy of actuality(1): “But surely if [potentiality takes precedence over actuality] there would be no beings at all, since it is possible to be capable of being and yet not be.” (1071b27-29) If the being of inner-worldly beings were constituted by potency, then these beings might exist or else they might not, but no reason accounts for their existence. This relies partly on the cosmological argument found in the eighth book of the Physics (258b26-259a8) which, briefly summarized, asserts that a series of ontologically contingent beings (that is, beings which admit potentiality) cannot be explained simply by explaining each thing in the series by the thing which comes before it in the series, and therefore that the series can only be explained by a pure actuality. Motion consists of the change in a substance from potentiality to actuality – for this argument to work it is rather essential that we not think of motion as the relative movement of extended substance in abstract space – and while one composite substance might cause another composite substance to be actualized in a certain way, this does not explain why anything has become actual in the first place. The whole infinite series of movers may as well not have been, and therefore even an infinite series of contingent things cannot explain the existence of the whole—which itself admits of potency. While an individual in the series of causes might be explained by the individual before it, this does absolutely nothing to explain why the series as a whole exists, when it might just as well not have. We might ask, with Leibniz, why not rather the nothing? Therefore, composite beings as well as the totality of composite beings, cannot account for their actuality, and so any account must include a necessary being(2); an account of existence as a whole presupposes the primacy of actuality.

The cosmological argument indicates something more basic concerning the nature of actuality and potentiality: that actuality cannot only be called prior to potentiality for purely a posteriori considerations (something exists rather than nothing), but also by virtue of what actuality and potentiality are. Thus, even for schools of thought, such as that represented in the Upanishads, which would not accept the basic tenets of Aristotelian physics which make his argument binding, if one only considers actuality (form) or potentiality (matter) it becomes evident that potentiality must depend on actuality if one hopes to have any sort of intelligible ontology. In the ontic sense, of course, actuality does depend in a way upon potentiality; in the case of tangible things, for example, we usually see that things must be able to be x before they actually become x. However, when we consider potentiality and actuality as such, we find that potentiality is only insofar as it is a kind of actuality—otherwise it would be nothing at all. David Bentley Hart summarizes the point nicely:

...While, in the realm of the ontic, the possible is in some sense a wellspring of the actual, this necessarily finite order requires a kind of conceptual inversion, which renders its logic infinite, if one is to think of being as such, for even possibility – whether one conceives of it as abstract forms or simply concealed “ecstasies” -- must first be... One must also recall that “necessary” here does not mean a first cause in the ontic sense, but the transcendent “possibility of possibility” (which must be infinite actuality). Anyway, even to think of the possibility as “higher” than actuality is covertly to think of it as actual... (3)

When one posits possibility as higher than actuality, error arises from the confusion in terms, because actuality has more being by virtue of what it means to be actual. The arguments above demonstrate this both a posteriori and a priori. Thus, we can now take the unmoved mover as the sheer actuality that acts as the source of being for all inner-worldly beings or – what is the same – the Mind in which the highest actuality of the forms gets constituted.

The foregoing treatment of thinking and form, actuality and potency, puts us in a position from which we can begin to attack the central question of the essay: to what extent can human participation in the divine be purely contemplative? Obviously, insofar as we think, we participate in the divine (our mind becomes like the divine Mind), but we might inquire more closely into how we participate as humans in the divine.

Perhaps the corollary to the thematic question will be best to deal with first. As mentioned above, Lear declares that “Man must be pulled in contrary directions: toward a political life within society and toward an anti-social life of contemplation,” and holds that Aristotle maintains the harmonious ethical life ought to be abandoned if possible for the higher, divine life of contemplation (Lear, 312). This argument seems to obscure a crucial difference between the the way in which the divine contemplates and the way in which human beings contemplate. God, not being a composite being, needs no engagement with things to begin thinking about them; rather, the intelligibility which renders things thinkable to humans gets constituted in God's thinking. Although when humans actualize their capacity to think they participate in the divine mind, they do not participate in the same way that God does—the thinking belongs entirely natural to God, while it does not belong entirely naturally to men. Humans can contemplate only what they encounter, and therefore, for humans, the importance of inner-worldly engagement with things cannot be ignored. Human beings certainly can exercise the contemplative life without company, while the social life is impossible under the same circumstances, but men cannot contemplate entirely apart from composite existence. A frog must at some point have been present for a human to contemplate what it means to be a frog, a tree must at some point have been present for a human to contemplate the form of a tree, and so on. It might be said that after a certain level of interaction with the objects of contemplation one no longer needs them and can go off to solitude to contemplate, and while this might be true of things, plants, and non-rational animals (which I am suspicious of), this cannot be said of human beings; for while it seems that whatever Kermit the frog can never exceed Kermit's frog-form – in other words, when one knows the form of frog, nothing remains left to know that Kermit himself might add – it seems that the human form remains so inexhaustible that a point will never be reached at which a finite mind will have achieved sufficient knowledge of the human form that it can leave to go off to solitude so that it might contemplate. Simply by virtue of human limitations the point Lear theorizes will inevitably be unreachable; knowing at least one form – the human form – cannot take place apart from the everyday engagement with particular substantiations of that form. This may not be a satisfactory answer, because it might be the case that the human form can be known by the solitary simply through his contemplation of the things around him—after all, the solitary still has himself. However, Aristotle's ontology maintains that a thing reaches the divine through its actuality as the particular kind of thing it is (for insofar as it manifests its form, it participates in the divine mind); therefore human beings participate in the divine insofar as they become more the kind of thing they are, and while this includes the rational faculty by which humans imitate God especially, one cannot ignore that this is one (especially privileged) aspect of the human form and that the animal and social aspects of man also fall within the human form—man is a political as well as a rational animal. Thus, if one intends to understand the human form by reflecting on himself, it seems that, in order for this self-reflection to capture the fullness of the human form, one must participate wholly in all aspects of what it means to be a human being—and this obviously must include the political dimension.

Now we have gained the position from which we can answer the original thematic question concerning the extent to which human participation in the divine is contemplative. The kind of motion which characterizes the divine is circular motion, because in circular motion there is no distinction in motion away from... and motion towards... Lear claims that the philosopher reaches a point where two different ways invite him in different directions, towards the social or political life or towards the solitary or contemplative life. Although I have argued these are not entirely mutually exclusive, it must be admitted that they still go in different directions; the one towards the purer divinity, the other towards the more ambiguous life possessed by a human being. However, one also should note that both of these are, in their own way, pathways to the divine by different routes. The more one becomes the kind of being one is, the closer one comes to pure actuality, and therefore engaging in animal and social life, though it may appear to be leading away from the divine, is an expression of the divine as actuality. The way which at first appears to be a more direct way to the divine in fact incorporates the ordinary types of human engagement. Despite the different directions the two pathways start out in, they meet in a sort of complimentary circularity, one less inherently stable than divine circularity, surely, but that is to be expected for a composite being, and so we can conclude that while contemplation may permeate the whole of human life and the participation of human life in the divine, it does not have to do so in a way that excludes the more mundane aspects of life, but instead takes them up into the context of a full, balanced human life.

___________________________
1Aristotle makes the fuller argument in Book Θ, Chapter 8 of the Metaphysics.

2“Necessary being” must be taken in an analogical sense here; neither Mind as Aristotle imagines it nor God as the Christian tradition later imagines it can be construed as having “being” in a univocal sense with circumscribed beings.

3. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing Co. p. 224

The Criminal and Civil Metaphors for Justification

Among all the analogies of the relation between God and man, the one most vulnerable to misinterpretation or exaggeration must surely be identified as the "legal analogy"; which, since Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, has enjoyed a preeminent status among other analogies, and which has, in some varieties of Christianity (particularly those located in the more "conservative" Protestant sectors) become either the reigning metaphor -- before which other metaphors, such as that of father and son, king and nation, or doctor and patient, must relinquish their traditional authority -- or, in extreme cases, a reality not bound by the humility claimed by metaphor. Several obvious objections may be leveled against such a lopsided emphasis; the most serious among these would consist of the elevation of Paul's writings, in which the legal analogy sees comparatively frequent use, above Jesus' sermons, which tend to use more personal metaphors--thus the excessive attention proceeds from a rather unbiblical theological preference rather than from the emphases found within the text itself.

But even aside from the unbalanced stress on the legal metaphor, in some quarters of Christendom exegetes relentlessly obscure the significance of the metaphor by misreading it. Often enough, one hears accounts of salvation which run something like this: mankind sits in the seat of the accused, having violated the Law of God, and God, as the judge of the court, renders the judgment that all who sin shall be condemned to eternal perdition. However, the son of the judge emerges, declares that, being innocent, he can take upon himself the judgment rendered upon mankind and spare those who accept his substitution for their just penalty. Thus mankind does not suffer the judgment of God, being instead free to enjoy the mercy of God as the result of Christ's sacrificial act. In all such stories -- and the one recounted here only conveys the basics of such exegeses -- one might find himself asking about the appropriateness of such an analogy: why does the finite violation of God's law merit infinite punishment, and isn't this (to express it mathematically) infinitely out of proportion? I have never come across a plausible way out of this impasse. Furthermore, how can we call that sort of substitution just? Even if an innocent willingly accepts the criminal punishment of another, has justice been meted out, or has it not instead been diverted to where it is not deserved? And, after all, Christ didn't undergo eternal damnation. The biggest problem with this analogy lies in the fact that Jesus saves mankind from the wrath of God (which only says: himself), and thus the enemy of humankind is God himself--this explains, at least in part, the psychological motivations of militant atheism. In any case, the metaphor's inconsistencies threaten not only its own integrity insofar as it does not even conform to the demands of its own internal logic, but its relationship to scripture and the whole of Christian tradition.

Any exegesis which construes Paul as discussing justification in terms of criminal law is at best anachronistic; Paul's legal analogy explicitly uses the language of civil law, particularly as it applies to slaves (Romans 6:16-19). The analogy might be better expressed in this way: men remain within the power of death, having enslaved themselves to the Devil by their defiance of God. No man can pay the ransom to the Devil required to buy their freedom, for they have become too ensconced in his power to be able to offer anything beyond a feeble revolt destined, at it outset, to failure. God, wanting back those who were once his, cannot simply rend them from the grasp of the Devil, for not only do they belong rightfully to the Devil, but nothing would prevent them from falling back into his grip; or to put it another way, God could consider those alienated from his glory no longer alienated, he could forgive their trespasses (in the sense of not allowing these trespasses to create division between creature and creator), he could change their legal status as a judge might change a deed to a piece of property, however, the people themselves would not change, for none of this would require the voluntary cooperation required to change their hearts. Instead God must pay the ransom to death himself, and in paying the ransom he offers the free gift of grace in such a way that the debt for freedom has been paid and men no longer remain rightfully under the power of the Devil. The only thing holding men within the power of the devil is their own decision to remain there unjustifiably, for they now belong rightfully to God.

This analogy has its limitations of course, but these only become problematic when the analogy itself gets emphasized disproportionately. Among the many virtues of this analogy one finds that the image of God conforms to a more Biblically and theologically acceptable one: our enemy all along has not been God but ourselves and the powers we have voluntarily enslaved ourselves to, and God's justice does not consist of equal parts of wrath and love, but purely of the love which liberates us from the clutch of the Devil, which we perceive as wrath only because it makes our destitution known to us and offers us a path of liberation we do not wish to take. God's justice, therefore, does involve the wildly disproportionate punishment found in the criminal analogy, but instead manifests in his power of setting things aright in a way which does not destroy their intrinsic logic (i.e., the free will of human beings). In legal terms, men have been bought as slaves, and they now have a new master however much they might yearn for the old one; the forces which determine one's fate have now all been rendered impotent except for two: man's will and the God's offer of salvation.

Although these comments hopefully establish the internal consistency of the analogy of civil law and the way in which it gets derived out of its Scriptural basis as superior to the analogy of criminal law, a few reservations might remain. Why, for example, do we speak of Christ as a sacrifice offered to God rather than to the power of death, why do we speak of Christ as reconciling men to God? This problem results from mixing metaphors; sacrifices belong to the province of (primitive) religious devotion and have very little to do with legal relations, and reconciliation belongs more properly within the personal sphere as the new possibility of rapprochement after a conflict. If one offers these as supplementary analogies (and one ought to), one must take care to give the analogy its own sphere of significance which can be brought alongside the legal analogy, but cannot be confused as one of the juridical analogy's component parts.

But, one might object, we do speak of God as a judge rendering a verdict; does this not indicate some presupposition of criminal law? And doesn't Paul speak of Jesus saving us from God's anger? In the first case, God renders a judgment in a civil issue; men belong by right to the dominion of death, having given themselves over to death of their own accord. God's judgment declares the validity of man's free decision and the legitimacy of death's claim. The punishment which follows the judgment consists in a "giving over" of the sinner to himself; or to put it another way, the punishment does not follow the judgment, it is the judgment, and the judgment in turn is little more than the explication of the implications of man's sin. Man sins, and God punishes him by letting him sin; the punishment of sin is that same sin, and the punishment may be differentiated only by the fact that it makes known the full nature of sin which can easily remain concealed. Thus the punishment follows the sin as the force of its articulation which cannot be evaded or ignored, and therefore God's judgment ought to be feared only because it recognizes the validity of human decisions, only because it gives man over to himself in a transparent way. And what of the propitiation which assuages God's anger? Because Christians confirm God's impassibility, one ought to be at the very least suspicious of any statement which suggests that the propitiation changes God's anger into love by changing something about God; rather, the change the propitiation effects occurs not in God -- for in asserting this one would be guilty of the kind of heresy which reduces God to the status of a pagan deity -- but in man. "We have been reconciled" (Romans 6:10), and God's wrath turns out to be the love to which we belong (having been bought) and which we experience only as wrath when we long for the old order from which God has freed us. His anger is his love when we cannot or do not accept it, just as the love of a parent appears repugnant to the malcontent child.

All of which does not say that a metaphor of God's relation to man cannot be depicted in terms of the accused criminal, however, one must hasten to add that the legal order in which the accused stands as accused is not properly the order of God's own justice, but instead one of those principalities and powers within the domain of sin and death. It is precisely this order from which God frees man, calling him to the higher order of a justice in which all is restored rather than destroyed--in which the entire order of creation is born again and renewed.

Daniel Dennett's Problem of Consciousness

A recent speech given by Daniel Dennett for TED illustrates the now common infiltration of scientific presuppositions into what often gets identified as the philosophical enterprise, and although this tendency to render the scientific method as metaphysically true can be seen most obviously in the neo-atheist's (among which Dennett counts himself) arguments against religion, in this case Dennett commits the same error of method in regard to cognitive philosophy. I have not read Consciousness Explained and so cannot comment on the rigor of that work, but I think it possible to see in Dennett's presentation for TED the starting point of his philosophical approach to the "problem" of consciousness. He says:

What you are, what I am, is approximately 100 trillion little cellular robots; that's what we're made of, no other ingredients at all, we're just made of cells... Not a single one of those cells are conscious, not a single one knows who you are or cares. Somehow we have to explain how when you put together teams, armies, battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells, not so different, really, from a bacterium, each one of them, the result is this [Dennet points to an an illustration of the mind], I mean just look at it: the content, there's colors, there's ideas, there's memories, there's history, and somehow all that content of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hordes of neurons. Many people just think it isn't possible, at all. They think: "No, there can't be any sort of naturalistic explanation of consciousness."

Dennett's description indicates a thoroughly materialistic metaphysic which considers the truly real aspects of the universe to be quarks, atoms, cells, electromagnetic forces, and so on. I have directly argued against this view elsewhere, but there's a rather obvious problem in talking about consciousness in this way which should be immediately evident to anyone with any philosophical acumen whatsoever. Even without any phenomenological training one might see the peculiarity of trying to explain consciousness by referring to things which can only be accessed through that same consciousness; or to put it another way, the problem of explaining consciousness by the objects of consciousness which can never be spoken of outside the domain of consciousness. Quarks and neurons can only be conceived of after one has adjusted their consciousness so as to conceive of the universe through mathematical physics; consciousness rather obviously precedes any of its objects in the act of knowing, whether they are scientific entities or common artifacts. Objecting to the explanation of a phenomena in terms of things which can only be made known by that phenomenon does not mean that one must fall back on the supernatural because no rational alternative can be found, and Dennett's method can only be called natural in the same sense as Locke's theory of perception: Locke attempted to explain the mind as a blank sheet of paper upon which experience writes, but in doing this he commits the "naturalistic fallacy"--he attempts to explain something by something else, though he -- more than Dennett -- understood this method as an analogy. Here we see the real problem: if we wish to explain something and understand it in itself we cannot simply substitute other things which admit to simpler explanation and declare our work done, and this basic error of substitution only gets aggravated when we try to explain something which reveals something else by the thing revealed.

If Dennett begins to study consciousness by the things to which consciousness might be directed such as the bodies cellular activity, he has already run past the phenomena of consciousness. Really, it makes no difference whether he attempts to explain consciousness though cellular activity, by referring to a sheet of paper, or by referring to anything else which he might be conscious of; for Dennett has ignored how we become conscious of these things in the first place.

The difficulty of discussing consciousness lies in the fact that we do not usually become conscious of consciousness, from which follows that philosophical language which talks about the things at which we can direct our conscious will have to be revamped or abandoned if it intends to make the mind thematic. Phenomenology takes up this project, and in Husserl, Heidegger, Merleu-Ponty, and others we see attempts at this. A good bit of conflict can be found, especially between Husserl and Heidegger, but the important thing about phenomenologists is that they realize the problem. Dennett would do well to engage with these philosophers instead of simply repeating the prejudices of cognitive science and christening it "philosophy."

Against Prohibitionism

Without the principle of moderation the possibility of true asceticism gets lost, and strangely enough this unfortunate state of affairs can often be found in those groups who claim to advocate moderation. Moderation does not have anything in common with prohibitionism as many seem to believe--from the point of view which advocates moderation, prohibitionism is an extreme to be avoided just as one ought to avoid excess.

I do not mean by "prohibitionism" specifically the historical movement which set out to ban alcohol, nor the continued theological position that one must avoid alcohol (though in these cases one sees in an obvious and concentrated form the attitude at which I take aim), but the disposition that if something should not be used in excess one ought -- in order to be on the safe side -- not to use it at all. In the case of alcohol, this attitude does not manifest in those who declare alcohol to be evil in principle; this is a different, and rather silly, intellectual disorder. To the Christian mind, this absolute prohibition of alcohol appears suspiciously close either to gnosticism (in its distrust of the goodness of creation), or to Islamic teaching. Even setting aside the historical attitude and traditional position of the Church towards alcohol, the Bible simply lauds wine -- and particularly in regard to its psychoactive effects which promote revelry and fraternity -- too loudly and too repeatedly for the intellectually honest fundamentalist to ignore. If one considers the Bible to be in any sense authoritative in the way a Christian ought to live his or her life, one simply cannot regard that which in the Psalms is declared to be made by God for the purpose of "[making] glad the heart of man" as evil without very obviously impugning God in the process. And those few who attempt through absurd etymological strategies to deny that the Hebrew word for "wine" means "wine" make Bishop Spong's Biblical criticism look like the work of a hermeneutical genius.

One finds a better example of the prohibitionist temperament I have in mind in those who accept the obvious historical reality concerning the Judeo-Christian use of wine and who -- while not maintaining an absolute prohibition against alcohol consumption -- hold that it might be better to abstain from alcohol altogether lest one drift into excess. Though this position has the benefit of at least being intellectually honest, it either misapprehends the nature of moderation or does not consider moderation virtuous in itself. Moderation does not simply mean avoiding excess, one must avoid deficiency as well; to paraphrase Aristotle, moderation stands in the mean between two extremes. The motivation of the prohibitionist just mentioned can be considered good, but incomplete: for by avoiding all alcohol (in this example) one does not violate the moral rule against drunkenness, but neither does one fully assert the goodness of the gift of wine. In Aristotelian terminology, one unintentionally falls into the extreme of deficiency while trying to avoid the opposite extreme of excess. Here one can see a fundamental problem that cannot simply be restricted to issues such as alcohol; that is, that creation is a good gift from God and must be received as such.

In asserting that one does best to not only avoid extremes but to avoid moderation as well, one must implicitly claim not only that whatever a person takes in moderation is not a good but that moderation itself is not good. In the case of alcohol the abstainer avoids drunkenness in a way which ends up expressing (quite unintentionally) disdain for God's creativity. The prohibitionist gets so wrapped up in avoiding doing wrong that he fails to do right, or else he conceives of moral law in a fundamentally negative way wherein one stays on the right side of the law simply by not violating it. In either case, we see that without a practiced moderation one cannot live fully, and that the state of one's soul gets inhibited in a way which makes it difficult -- though not entirely impossible -- to affirm the goodness of creation.

Moderation must not be interpreted in solely a legal way; though it is a mean it is not a mathematical mean. To eat moderately does not really entail eating a precise amount of food; moderation cannot be placed on a coordinate system. For this reason Aristotle asserts that while moderation requires a mean between extremes, moderation is itself an extreme; in other words, in order to be moderate one must avoid excess and deficiency, but this alone does not constitute moderation--it merely makes it possible. Once a person frees himself from extremes he creates the calm space in which he can enact virtue. In the case of food, moderation becomes possible when one neither eats too much or too little, but moderation is achieved when one relates to food as one ought to. It is quite possible that one avoids excesses but still is not moderate. Similarly, in the case of alcohol one cannot be called moderate simply by avoiding drunkenness or excessive sobriety; one is moderate when, neither given to drunkenness nor sobriety, one relates to alcohol as a good to which one is not enslaved but which one may enjoy as one should. Moderation is a state of the soul, and moderation with regard to alcohol is simply a particular way in which this moderation may express itself.

Moderation with regard to alcohol cannot be considered as an ethical issue independently from wider ethical issues, and not only because -- in the Christian tradition especially -- immoderate alcohol intake gets categorized as a species of gluttony. Whether a person can drink moderately speaks to the state of their soul; an inability to drink a reasonable amount of alcohol is not so much bad in itself as it is an indication that one suffers from a disordered soul. Indeed, consuming alcohol in moderation offers good practice at being moderate generally, and only though practice and habituation can one become moderate. Thus when the prohibitionist abstains from something in order to avoid excess he not only engages in a sort of excess of his own (and this might indicate a wider disorder), but deprives himself of an opportunity to improve the state of his soul.

Some cases do exist where one simply ought not to partake in some good he or she finds simply too tempting; this, of course, indicates something analogous to an illness in which one forgoes the mean because of excessive personal weakness. In these cases, abstinence stands as the best choice, but it must be considered a diminished good arising from a particular pathology; or to put it another way, an unfortunate circumstance arising from a psychological disability. This ought be viewed not with disdain but with a compassionate awareness that recognizes the situation as not ideal but best given the circumstances. We might think of other cases in which a supervening reason, such as the wishes of one's friends or family, might cause someone to justifiably forgo the mean. In these cases one must again realize that the circumstances do not allow for what is ideal, that those who rule out moderate behavior are wrong, and one must take special care not to let the spirit of immoderation spread beyond its current site of infection. One must always remember that all goods take place in a mean, and that in order for them to be accepted as good one must have incorporated the principle of moderation into one's soul.

The practice of moderation -- whether in alcohol, food, entertainment, time management, and so on -- ought to be viewed as the practice of training one's soul in virtue and as part of the process of achieving moral maturity. One gains personal stability and good judgment in this way and only in this way. By denying the goodness of alcohol or food one implicitly impugns the wider goodness of creation, and by avoiding moderation in this instance one falls prey to an extreme which makes it more difficult to practice moderation generally. Fortunately, those who oppose the use of alcohol very often do not let this tendency infect too deeply the other aspects of their lives and so prevent the prohibitionist attitude from causing any wider damage. However one must keep in mind as a Christian that only when the soul stands well ordered in a state of moderation can one receive creation as a gift by enjoying it without being enslaved by it, and only in this way can one maintain a relation to things which both affirms their goodness and places God as the source of all good things; only in moderation can asceticism be a celebration, rather than a condemnation, of creation.

Freedom, Ancient and Modern

One ought to take care when speaking of freedom as something valuable in itself; the truth of such an assertion depends entirely on which sense one uses "freedom." In political dialogue, freedom often indicates the absence of coercion: one can be considered free when he or she chooses without external compulsion. This notion of freedom probably goes beyond simply being ever-present in political conversation; it determines the plane on which the discussion takes place and different political positions often arise from slightly different permutations of this concept of freedom.

For example, libertarians (and usually fiscal conservatives) understand freedom to mean the absence of government interference; the libertarian considers a person free when the government leaves him to mind his own affairs as he wishes. The libertarian understands coercion primarily in the sense of external violence. The liberal, on the other hand, understands freedom not as an absence, but as the presence of the resources which allow a person to carry on his affairs. The liberal believes that one can only be considered free when he has sufficient resources to exercise his freedom, and therefore freedom takes on an active dimension. The liberal understands coercion as not only active intervention but as material deprivation. Social conservatives offer a third perspective in which the government maintains a moral society. By enforcing a stable society with a clear code of morality, the government protects the conservative's freedom from having to suffer from the spectacle of public immorality. Here, coercion signifies the imposition of morally undesirable behaviors which affect others.

These interpretations of freedom arise out of a particular philosophic formulation of freedom: freedom as the autonomy of will. In this sense, human beings can be called free if one's choices do not get determined by outside forces but by one's will alone. One sees this quickly in the debate over determinism: some philosophers argue that all the choices a person makes have already been decided. Even if the cause of all decisions were to be found as the will, human beings would still not be considered free because the will is not autonomous (in that it could not have chosen otherwise). In this philosophic interpretation of freedom one can be called free only if the source of his or her decisions -- the will -- could choose any number of different ways and chooses based on a pure act of will in which no reference point behind the will can be found.

This understanding of philosophy is without doubt a modern one; one which has lost a higher idea of freedom. This higher sort of freedom requires something very like the kind of freedom described previously, it requires the capacity to choose without external compulsion. However, this sort of freedom does not consist in autonomy, but depends on one's essence. Freedom is the manifestation of who one is. This even applies in a limited way to non-rational life: a flower, if it receives nutrients and sunlight, grows and expresses what it means to be a flower. If it suffers deprivation of sunlight or nutrients it dies or becomes deformed in such a way that it no longer shows what it means to be a flower then its freedom has been infringed.

Similarly with a person: if one is an artist and has the means and opportunity to pursue one's artwork, one possesses freedom in respect to being an artist. If one does not have the resources to express oneself as an artist, one is not free. The uniqueness of human beings lies in our ability to express many different sorts of essences, to be free and unfree with regard to these different essences, and to govern these various expression with our rational faculty. Freedom does not mean simply choosing, it means choosing what is in accord with our nature.

Though human beings can express different essences, one stands out as particularly basic. The essence of human being seems to include and delimit things such as artistry. Indeed, it seems other human potentialities depend on -- and perhaps are only a modification of -- human nature. Therefore, one could reasonably suggest that the primary sense of freedom consists in how well a person manifests the human essence; a person's freedom for the most part means how well he or she lives up to what it means to be human.

This necessarily entails limits on the autonomy of the human will; the sheer exercise of the will does not in itself constitute freedom and can actually result in bondage. Certain action of the will acquire a significance beyond the will itself, a significance grounded in human nature. This means not all choices can be considered equivalent, that some choices stand in accord with one's human nature (in existential language: some choices are authentic) and other choices violate one's nature as a human being (existentially, these choices are inauthentic). At the one end we have virtuous activity; not virtue in the sense of conforming to universal moral law, but virtue in the (Greek) sense of human excellence. The virtuous man stands out as particularly showing what it means to be a human being; put another way, the virtuous man manifests his human nature well. On the other end we could think of vices, not as an instance which violates some universal moral law, but as activity which betrays one's own human nature. Degrading activities such as torture or prostitution stand out here as obvious examples.

At this point one who holds the modern view of freedom might say that even degrading activities express one's freedom, that if one prevents another from such things one violates his or her right of choice. In order to hold this position, one cannot simply propose that human nature is not static but dynamic, and that norms from one group cannot be applied to other groups. Few great philosophers would say that human nature can be expressed in a static fashion; most -- at least most among the ancients -- would be at home with the Aristotelian position that human nature comes to be through commonly shared meaning in a community. Further, and more to the point, in order to call an activity degrading one must mean that it does a disservice to the one who performs it; one must say that through degrading acts one misrepresents and reduces who he or she is. This relies on a coherent notion of a human essence, regardless of whether it is dynamic or static, grounded transcendentally or practically. Therefore, our opponent must either hold that there is no such thing as human nature, or that in principle it is necessary that some actions degrade ones essence. If one believes the concept of human essence to be without content, one can hardly argue about human freedom since by discussing human freedom one already operates with some latent concept of humanity.

Having put forth the ancient way of thinking about freedom, we might consider for a moment the coherency of the modern version. It seems that, if this sort of freedom is a good, the things which restrict it are bad. In the political sphere, we might think of certain laws, the absence of resources, or the imposition of riotous immorality as restricting freedom. But if we think beyond the political sphere to the wider implications of such freedom, we find something more controversial. It seems that autonomy is violated by every instance of specificity. That is, insofar as we are something concretely, we limit ourselves. Every time one chooses, one limits himself. If one chooses to be a liberal, for example, in that instant he closes off the possibility that he chose to be a conservative--even if he changes his mind later. If one chooses to travel to France, one cannot simultaneously be in Australia. Every time one exercises one's freedom, one simultaneously limits it. Even refusing to take stands and make decisions closes off possibilities, for temporality itself refuses such absolute autonomy. Existing in any definite way places restrictions on the will, and it is for precisely this reason that the theologian David Bentley Hart accuses the modern form of freedom as fundamentally nihilistic. The very act of existing requires us at every moment to be something definite, to close off our choices. The only way one can be absolutely autonomous: one must escape existence altogether. Modern nihilism can be directly linked with the demand for absolute freedom of will.

Part of the blame for this, ironically enough, lies with theology. David Hart describes how William of Occam introduced the notion of freedom as autonomy into theology as nominalism, which later became systematized as Calvinsim. I quote at length from his book The Beauty of the Infinite:

[W]hen nominalism largely severed the perceptible world from the analogical index of divine transcendence, and thus reduced divine freedom to an ontic voluntarism, and theophany to mere legislation, such that creation and revelation could be imagined only as manifestations of the will of a god who is, at most, a supreme being among lesser beings, theology and philosophy alike were surrendered to a kind of elected darkness; and when the nominalists, or those of the factio occamista who followed them, succeeded in shattering the unity of faith and reason, and so the compact between theology and philosophy (or as, in an Occamist moment, Luther phrased it, "that whore"), both were rendered blind... For theology, of course, this represents an incalculable impoverishment: it contributed to a quite unbiblical dread of the goodness of creation, a misconstrual of divine glory as a supernatural corollary to the majesty of the sheer power of a human monarch, the idolatrous diminution of God to the condition of a composite being -- rather than the source of all being -- whose acts could, like ours, be indifferently related to his essence, expressing or dissimulating his nature... At a critical moment in cultural history -- not that there were not various fateful moves in the history of Western theology that led to it -- many Christian thinkers somehow forgot that the incarnation of the Logos, the infinite ratio for all that is, reconciles us not only to God, but to the world, by giving us back a knowledge of creation's goodness, allowing us to see again its essential transparency -- even to the point, in Christ, of identity -- before God. The covenant of light was broken. God became, progressively, the world's infinite contrary. And this state of theological decline was so precipitous and complete that it even became possible for someone as formidably intelligent as Calvin, without any apparent embarrassment, to regard the fairly lurid portrait of the omnipotent despot in book III of his Institutes -- who not only ordains the destiny of souls, but in fact predestines the first sin, and so brings the whole drama of creation and redemption to pass (including the eternal perdition of the vast majority of humanity) as a display of his own dread sovereignty -- as a proper depiction of the Christian God. One ancient Augustinian misreading of Paul's ruminations on the mystery of election had, at last, eventuated in fatalism. (131-132)

Calvin, in Hart's view, systematizes the perversion of freedom. Omnipotence, instead of indicating that God, in his transcendence, is always the full and perfect expression of himself, indicates instead the infinite power to dominate and control others in a way analogous to political power. But God's absolute freedom in the higher sense would mean a restriction on the autonomy of the will; God cannot do a great number of conceivable things, for this would be at odds with what it means to be God – or put another way, this autonomy would actually violate God's freedom. When freedom gets reduced to the autonomy of will it becomes theologically possible for God to willfully bring about evil, as Calvin makes evident.

A full return to the full notion of freedom transforms not only theology, but philosophical anthropology and politics. It would reopen the question of human nature with a certain urgency, for – as Aristotle notes in the Nicomachean Ethics – the more understanding one has of human nature, the better one understands how to be virtuous; this, certainly, offers a better standard than adherence to universal laws. This, in turn, leads to political questions; as men are social animals, their freedom manifests in their engagement with others. However, it transforms the level of political discussion as well, for if freedom consists in manifesting the human essence, politics becomes the place in which this can be enacted practically.

God and Being: A Review of Part I of John Macquarrie's Systematic Theology

In Being and Time one finds the question of the relation between being and God, ontology and theology asserting itself again and again, though not explicitly. Heidegger's reopening of the question of being transforms the history of philosophy, and one must wonder what impact it could have on theology given the close relation between the two. Despite Heidegger's warning that he is engaging in a fundamental ontology which must remain separate and prior to any theology, and despite his claim that if he wrote a work on theology it would not contain the word "being", one nevertheless wonders what relation being has to God. Is God what Heidegger calls being? Or does God transcend even being? John Macquarrie's Principles of Christian Theology takes on this question, proving a theological response to (and sometimes an appropriation of) Heidegger's thought.

Read the complete essay.

Life is Art

"Our religion, morality, and philosophy are decadence forms of humanity -- the countermovement: art."

-Nietzsche, Will to Power.

In the West, either religion, morality, or philosophy stands widely considered as providing the meaning for things, people, and relationships. Christianity commands that we look on nature as a fundamentally good, albeit corrupted, creation. Morality demands we treat others as we would be treated ourselves. Philosophy (science being one of its derivations) tells of an external, real world. Nietzsche intended to overturn Western modes of thought, and so it comes as no surprise that he wishes to overturn religion, morality, and philosophy.

"The countermovement: art." But why art? Does Nietzsche merely mean to turn from the objective to the subjective? This surely underestimates both the nature of art and the depth of Nietzsche's thought. Nietzsche does not advocate turning away from life and living to a banal relativism. He wishes to end the turn away from life to the otherworldly, whether through religion or metaphysics; more clearly than anything, Nietzsche calls these flights of fancy back to life.

Nietzsche identifies a close relationship between art and life. What is art but bringing forth? Until relatively recently, art encompassed such things as craftsmanship as well as fine art. When one builds a table, he brings forward what was not already there: the craftsmen is a creator. Life also possesses the character of bringing forth--in life man creates himself. Throughout the whole of life, man makes himself who he is. Does he create himself as religions says? As philosophy would demand? Nietzsche argues these stifle man's creativity, it obstructs his role as creator, and consequently religion and philosophy deny life as creative self-becoming.

"Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-nihilist par exellence."